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My gadget guilt: Inside the Foxconn iPhone factory

This article was taken from the April 2011 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content bysubscribing online.

This is an iPhone factory in China. Seventeen of the company's workers have committed suicide. Is it our fault?

It's hard not to look at the nets. Every building is skirted in them. They drape every precipice, steel poles jutting out six metres above the pavement, loosely tangled like tennis-court nets in winter. The nets went up in May, after the 11th jumper in under a year died here. They carry a message: you can throw yourself off any building you like, as long as it isn't one of these. And they seem to have worked. Since they were installed, the suicide rate has slowed to a trickle.

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My tour guides don't mention the nets until I do. Not to avoid the topic, I don't think -- the suicides are the reason I am at a

Foxconn plant in Shenzhen, a bustling industrial city in southern China -- but simply because they are so prevalent.

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Foxconn, the single largest private employer in mainland China, manufactures many of the products -- motherboards, camera components, MP3 players -- that make up the world's $150 billion consumer-electronics industry. Foxconn's output accounts for nearly 40 per cent of that revenue. Altogether, the company employs about a million people, nearly half of whom work at the 20-year-old Shenzhen plant. But until two summers ago, most Brits had never heard of Foxconn.

That all changed with the suicides. There had been a few since 2007. Then a spate of nine between March and May 2010 -- all jumpers. There were also suicides at other Foxconn plants in China. Although the company disputes some cases, evidence gathered from news reports and other sources indicates that 17 Foxconn workers have killed themselves in the past half-decade.

What had seemed to be a series of isolated incidents was becoming an appalling trend. When one jumper left a note explaining that he committed suicide to provide for his family, the programme of remuneration for the families of jumpers was cancelled. Some saw the Foxconn suicides as a damning consequence of our global hunger for low-cost electronics. Reports from inside the factories warned of "sweatshop" conditions; old allegations of forced overtime burbled back to life. Foxconn and its partners -- notably Apple -- found themselves defending factory conditions as it struggled to explain the deaths. "Suicides in China prompt damage control," blared The New York Times.

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I seem to be witnessing some of those damage-control efforts on this still-warm autumn day as two Foxconn executives -- along with a liaison from Burson-Marsteller, a PR firm hired to deal with the post-suicide outcry -- lead me through the facility. I have spent much of my career blogging about technology on sites such as Boing Boing Gadgets and Gizmodo, reviewing and often praising many of the products that were made right here at Foxconn's Shenzhen factory. I ignored the first Foxconn suicides as sad but statistically inevitable. But as the number of jumpers approached double digits, latent self-reproach began to boil over. Out of a million people, 17 suicides isn't much -- indeed, American college students kill themselves at four times that rate. Still, after years of writing what is (at best) buyers' guidance and (at worst) marching songs for an army of consumers, I was burdened by what felt like an outsized provision of guilt -- an existential buyer's remorse for civilisation itself. I am here because I want to know: did my iPhone kill 17 people?

My hosts are eager to help me answer that question in the negative by pointing out how pleasant life in the factory can be.

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They are quick with the college analogies: the canteens and mess halls are "like a college food court". The living quarters, where up to eight workers share rooms about the same size as a two-car garage, are "like college dorms". The avenues and boulevards in the less industrial parts of the campus are "like shopping malls".

For all their defensiveness, my guides are not far off the mark.

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The avenues certainly look more like a college campus than the dingy design-by-communism concrete canyons I half expected to find.

Sure, everything on the Foxconn campus is a bit shabby -- errant woody saplings creep out of cracks in the pavement, and the signage is sometimes rusty or faded: more community college than top-flight university, perhaps. But it's generally clean. Workers stroll outside, chatting and laughing, smoking together in groups under trees, as amiable as any group of factory workers in the west.

But "college campus" doesn't quite capture the vastness of the place. It's more like a nation-state, a gated complex covering just over 1.6km2, separated from the rest of Shenzhen's buildings by chain-link and concrete. It houses one of the largest industrial kitchens in Asia -- perhaps the world. Shenzhen itself was developed over the past three decades as one of party leader Deng Xiaoping's Special Economic Zones -- a kind of capitalist hot spot.

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The experiment was a rousing success. Millions of workers, gambling that low but dependable wages would be more readily found in Shenzhen, migrated from the poor, rural western provinces, packing into the tenement complexes that soon riddled the city. Factory work offered a chance to change their lives and the lives of their families back home, but it offered little in the way of security.

Many companies did not supply housing, leaving workers to find shelter in dodgy slums or encouraging them to sleep on the assembly line. When they did provide accommodation, it was typically a dorm room crammed with bunk beds.

According to company lore, Foxconn founder Terry Gou was determined to do things differently. So when the firm built its Longhua factory in Shenzhen, it included on-site dormitories -- good ones, designed to be better than what workers could afford on their own. Terry Gou built on-campus housing, I am told, because Terry Gou cared about the welfare of his employees. Up went a factory, up went a dorm.

Up went an assembly line, up went a cafeteria. Although other companies' workers fended for themselves or slept under the tables they worked at, Gou's employees were well fed, safe from the petty crime of a growing metropolis and surrounded by peers and advocates.

It sounds like unalloyed munificence -- until a man puts his foot on the edge of a roof, looks across the campus full of trees and swimming pools and coffee shops, and steps off into nothing.

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In the part of our minds where we westerners hold an image of what an Asian factory may look like, there are two competing visions: fluorescent fields of chittering machines attended by clean-suited technicians; or barefoot labourers bent double over long wooden tables in sweltering rooms hazed by a fog of soldering fumes.

When we buy a new electronic device, we imagine the former factory. Our little glass, metal and plastic marvel is the height of modern technological progress; it must have been made by worker-robots (with hands like surgeon-robots) -- or, failing that, extremely competent human beings.

But when we think "Chinese factory", we are more likely to imagine the latter. Some of us in the west -- and here I should probably stop speaking in generalities and simply refer to myself -- harbour a guilty suspicion that the products we buy from China, even those made for western companies, come to us at the expense of underpaid and oppressed labourers.

From what I can tell, though, the reality is more banal than either of those scenarios. This is what it's like to work at the Foxconn factory: you enter a five- or six-storey concrete building, pull on a plastic jacket and hat, and slip protective booties over your shoes. You then walk up a wide staircase to your assigned floor, the entirety of which lies open under an unwavering fluorescent light.

It's likely that your job will require you to sit or stand in place for most of your shift. Maybe you grab components from a bin and slot them into circuit boards as they move down a conveyer belt. Or you might tend a machine, feeding it tape that holds tiny microprocessors like sweets on paper spools. Or you may sit next to a refrigerator-sized machine, scrutinising its handiwork under a magnifying glass. Or you could sit at a bench with other technicians, placing completed mobile-phone circuit boards into lead-lined boxes resembling small kilns, testing each piece for electromagnetic interference.

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If you need to go to the toilet, you raise your hand until your spot on the line can be covered. You get an hour for lunch and two ten-minute breaks; roles are switched around every few days for cross-training. It seems incredibly boring -- like factory work anywhere in the developed world.

You work ten hours or so, depending on overtime. You walk or take a shuttle back to your dorm, where you share a room with up to seven other employees that Foxconn management has selected as your bunk-mates. You watch television in a common room with bench seating, on a high-definition set that seems insultingly small compared with the giant units you and your coworkers assemble every day. Or maybe you play video games or check your emails in one of the on-campus cybercafés, perhaps sharing a semi-private "couple's booth" with a girlfriend or boyfriend.

In the morning, you clean yourself up in your room's communal sink or in one of the dorm's showers, then head back to the production line to do it all over again.

A report by the Mail on Sunday in 2006 accused Foxconn of forcing workers to put in long shifts to meet unrealistic quotas. That report prompted an audit from Apple, which found "no instances of forced overtime" but noted that employees "worked longer hours than permitted by our Code of Conduct" -- more than 60 hours a week. (Apple has performed such audits every year since.)

In April 2010, the Chinese newspaper Southern Weekend sent a young reporter into Foxconn to work undercover for a month; he returned with bleak tales of hopelessness and "voluntary overtime affidavits". A report in October by Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour, a Hong Kong-based labour-rights group, found that workers at Foxconn's Shenzhen plant worked 13 days straight, 12 hours a day, to produce the first generation of Apple's iPad. Foxconn has denied the reports and said it complies with all Chinese regulations regarding working hours and overtime.

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That 17 people have committed suicide at Foxconn is a tragedy.

But, in fact, the suicide rate at Foxconn's Shenzhen plant remains below national averages for both rural and urban China, a bleak but unassailable fact that does much to exonerate the conditions at Foxconn and absolutely nothing to bring those 17 people back.

The work itself isn't inhumane -- it's repetitive, exhausting, alienating and in a workplace over which you have no influence or authority, but doesn't that describe every manufacturing or burger-flipping job in history?

I walk one afternoon to the gaudiest concentration of Shenzhen's manufacturing power, the SEG Square electronics market in the Futian district. My Taiwanese guide, Paul, has spent the better part of a decade in Shenzhen as a steward for western electronics companies seeking to procure components or goods from one of the city's thousands of suppliers. Here in SEG Square the products of those suppliers fill glass cases and hang from pegboards in vast, low-ceilinged grottos that would echo if they weren't crammed wall-to-wall with vendors' stalls. Elsewhere in Shenzhen, such markets are stocked with bamboo knick-knacks and counterfeit Puffa jackets; this one is filled with obviously fake iPhone chargers.

SEG Square's markets are crowded, loud and reek of cigarette smoke and the odour of fresh-baked electronics. Whole floors are dedicated to knock-offs, not just at-first-glance-perfect clones of popular products but also cargo-cult evocations, such as FM radios cast from a third-generation iPhone mould that probably wasn't convincingly accurate in the first place. It all looks like so much junk, but there is something touching about it. Each item was once the moment's work of a human being.

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Paul has seen his share of factories in Shenzhen over the years.

I ask him about Foxconn and he echoes the sentiment I've heard from others: whatever problems Foxconn has, it's still one of the top places to work in the area. "In terms of infrastructure, Foxconn is by far the best factory in China," he says. We stop to haggle with a vendor over five non-functional dummy iPhones (in mythic white) that I want to buy as gifts for friends back home. "But how much of that is a façade?" Paul asks, citing the LCD monitors that grace the company's assembly lines -- ostentatious symbols of modernity that provide little benefit to the workers. "Pointless waste of electricity."

As for the Cyberfox Café, Foxconn's onsite internet lounge, where I recently ate a fine bowl of bitter melon soup? "It might look huge, but considering the size of Foxconn's workforce," Paul says, "it can't even serve five per cent of the employees."

Even if it is one of the better places to work in Shenzhen (at least for entry-level factory jobs), by the middle of 2010, after the suicides, it was clear to Foxconn management that they were no longer running an anonymous manufacturing company. Foxconn was now a billion-dollar avatar of globalisation, and they were feeling the rubbernecked gape of international scrutiny.

The living quarters on the Shenzhen campus were recently handed over to property-management companies that are more experienced at addressing the living needs of employees. Foxconn hopes that the outside firms will be quicker to respond to tenant complaints, although some critics suggest the company hopes to outsource some of the blame as well. (When Foxconn constructs new inland factories, the living quarters will be managed in partnership with local governments.)

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Foxconn has also built on-site counselling facilities, staffed by psychologists and counsellors. I toured two such facilities.

One, sharing shop-front space on a busy avenue, has agents who can help workers replace lost key-cards or buy prepaid mobile-phone cards to call home; this place was fairly busy. Another, off the main drag, was a full-on care centre with music-therapy rooms, private counselling and lounge areas; when I visited, it was nearly empty. In one room, a life-size Weeble Wobble with a scowling face could be smacked with a padded baseball bat. (It relieved my own stress for a moment.)

But the most ambitious effort to address worker morale is a modest-looking electronics store on the Foxconn campus, right next to a shop selling fresh fruit. It's called Ten Thousand Horses Galloping. (I'm assured the name has more pizzazz in Chinese.)

Inside, you can buy rice cookers and desk fans and phones. It's like a Curry's -- minus the large appliances. And according to Foxconn executives, it's the future of their company.

Foxconn campuses already have company shops where workers can buy the products they manufacture at discounted prices. Ten Thousand Horses Galloping is designed to be an electronics store for the rest of China. Foxconn plans to offer franchises to employees and even grant them a little start-up capital.

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The idea is to give some lucky, hardworking employees a way to bring a touch of entrepreneurial spirit back to their home provinces, especially in the poorer west. The workers get to own their own businesses; Foxconn gets to supply the shops with goods.

To date, Foxconn has granted franchises to 60 employees and several more to outsiders.

Foxconn positions Ten Thousand Horses Galloping as a new direction for the company; one that allows it to shift into retail as it taps into the cream of the roughly million-strong workforce it has cultivated in China. But the store also offers another benefit to Foxconn, one that wasn't even needed until recently: employee retention. In recent years, factories have been sprouting up in China's interior to take advantage of cheaper labour. Workers aren't flocking to Shenzhen as they did a decade ago, when it was one of the only places you could get a manufacturing job. "Now that work opportunities are increasing in the interior regions of the country, would-be migrants are willing to take a lower salary at home to stay with their families," says Benjamin Dolgin-Gardner, general manager of Shenzhen CE and IT Limited. Even Foxconn itself is building a facility in Hunan, after being lured by multibillion-dollar tax and investment incentives from the provincial government.

Shenzhen may soon relinquish its role as the stoked furnace of the Chinese dream. But will that mean even greater expansion of the middle class, with commensurate benefits -- or just the same old system shifted a 1,500km to the west?

In the west there is a widely held belief that we humans have a God-given dominion over the Earth's resources. Others argue, however, that we are, at our best, caretakers that must strive to live in harmony with all that other living things sharing our planet's fragile ecosystem.

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My heart is with the caretakers. Nevertheless, the west has built a middle class. It's now eroding and may be less enduring that we'd imagined, yet most of us still have food, cars, gadgets.

How can we begrudge a single person these luxuries if we want them ourselves?

The truth is that we can't. However, eyes should remain firmly focused on Foxconn: the eyes of media, both foreign and domestic, of government inspectors and partner companies. The work may well be humane, but rampant overtime is not. We should encourage workers' rights just as much as we proudly champion economic development. The west has exported its manufacturing; let's be sure to export trade unions, too.

I've written thousands of posts, millions of words, about things. Usually these are things with electricity in them. Doing this for a living, on and off, for the better part of a decade, has greatly -- perhaps fundamentally -- changed how I perceive the world around me. I can no longer look at the material world as a collection of objects but instead see interfaces, histories, and materials.

To be soaked in materialism, to champion it directly and indirectly, has also brought guilt. I don't know if I have a right to the vast quantities of materials and energy that I consume in my daily life. Even if I thought I did, I know that the planet cannot bear my lifestyle multiplied by seven billion individuals. I believe that this understanding is shared, if only subconsciously, by almost everyone in the western world.

Every last trifle we touch and consume, right down to the paper on which this magazine is printed or the screen on which it's displayed, is not only ephemeral but in a real sense irreplaceable.

Every consumer good has a cost not borne out by its price but instead falsely bolstered by a vanishing resource economy. We squander millions of years' worth of stored energy, stored life, from our planet to make not only things that are critical to our survival and comfort but also things that simply satisfy our innate primate desire to possess. It's this guilt that we are attempting to assuage with the hope that our consumerist culture is making life better -- for ourselves, of course, but also in some lesser way for those who cannot afford to buy everything that we purchase, consume, or own.

When that small appeasement is challenged even slightly, when that thin, taut cord that connects our consumption to the nameless millions who make our lifestyle possible snaps even for a moment, the gulf that we find ourselves peering into -- a yawning, endless future of emptiness on a squandered planet -- becomes too much to bear. When 17 people take their lives, I ask myself, did I in my desire hurt them? Even just a little?

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And of course the answer, inevitable and immeasurable as the fluttering silence of our Sun, is yes.

Just a little.

Joel Johnson is the editor-at-large of Gizmodo.com and has written for The New York Times, Boing Boing and Gawker.

This article was first published in the April 2011 issue of WIRED magazine